Security is the biggest barrier to greater tech autonomy, or permitting employees to use technologies of their choice in India. However, tech autonomy would empower employees, result in revenue growth and make businesses more efficient, according to a survey by Internet security firm Blue Coat Systems.
About 92 per cent of the respondents in India said tech autonomy would help in improving business. More than one-third of employees also said tech autonomy would help in improving revenues.
India ranks among the top three or four countries when it comes to tech autonomy, which is termed as applications that employees would like to use without the explicit consent of the IT department.
In India cloud storage applications ranked first, with 25 per cent of the respondents stating that these were used without the IT department’s consent.
“In many companies the amount of storage an employee would like to have is much greater than what the IT department would permit. There is a need for a particular storage capability, and IT isn’t delivering that, then the employee would get it from a cloud storage service,” David Murphy, President and Chief Operating Officer at Blue Coat Systems told Business Line in an interaction.
Social media applications and marketing automation applications ranked second (23 per cent each), while office applications ranked fourth. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software ranked fifth, according to the survey.
“These are the desired applications that employees on the business side want to have,” he said, social media apps are important as most of the companies do not have these suites internally.
“The broader question is what kind of applications you want to use, and this might not be exactly on the cloud,” he said.
The company surveyed more than 1,900 business and IT leaders from across the world and about 200 in India.